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Monday, January 27, 2014

Bread and sourdough!

To be honest, I have never been the baker. I´ve worked at a bakery, and seen how bakers work long nights, fuck up their breads by forgetting ingredients, but still manage to redo everything and finish up after a 12 hour shift. Unfortunately, good, cheap and tasteful bread is really hard to come by. And being the man that I am, I wanted to challenge that by making my own.
6 months ago, I wanted to create a sourdough starter. Searching on the web, you find all kinds of recipes for starters telling you to mix several ingredients and making it a 100% hydrated. I tried once with the regular bread flour, it didn´t work out that great. Then I tried mixing several flours and added salt, the salt killed the sourdough bacterias (not a good idea). At that time, the adventure ended and I actually quit for while.

During christmas, I had a lot of good bread! the upside of family dinners and restaurants amongst other things of course... therefor I set out on a new sourdough journey after new years. This time using 75g ecological wheat flour (bought at sunkost) and 25g "ecological sammalt hvete" mixing it with 68g of tempered water in a plastic container with plastic film on top to keep moisture. Getting rid of half and feeding it with the same initial amount every day for the first week was easy! Stored in my heated bathroom to accelerate the process, bubbles started to show! I took the water test, and the sourdough floated! Boom, I was finally ready to bake bread. It was DELISH. From now on, I only need to keep the sourdough alive with 1/4 of the feeding amount respecting the ratios every 48 hours or so... If you want to use the starter, double the "initial feeding amount", leave it for 12 hours and its going to be quite bubbly I tell you. A bread now cost me 16 Nok instead of 50, the amount it costs for a good sourdough bread in town.
Dear I say that it tastes better? yes, because I baked it, and it looks awesome! But I guess that´s a normal reaction...
PS: storing sourdough in the bathroom, a way to a womans heart? try to find another warm place to store it, not the most popular thing I´ve done ;)